Small Wonder Read Free Page B

large find it difficult to leave large predators alive. Bears and wolves are our fairy-tale archenemies, and in these tales we teach our children only, and always, to kill them, rather than to tiptoe past and let them sleep. Maybe that’s why I’m comforted by the image of a small child curled in the embrace of a mother bear. We need new bear and wolf tales for our times, since so many of our old ones seem to be doing us no good. Now we’re finding that it takes our every effort of will and imagination to pull back, to stop in our tracks as hunter and hunted, to halt our habit of killing, before every kind of life we know arrives at the brink of extinction.
    Some days you have to work hard to save the bear. Some days the bear will save you.
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    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
    That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
    And spills the upper boulders in the sun….
    In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost invokes the image of his neighbor walking the fence line intent on constant survey and repair, here and there raising up a boulder between his hands, “like an old-stone savage armed,” to put it back in its place, determined to keep this boundary intact, though it restrains only trees. ( My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him .) “Good fences make good neighbors,” is the onlyrationale the neighbor will offer, as his father said before him. The poet is baffled at so much resolute effort.
    And so we all might well feel baffled, as we awaken this morning to find the greatest part of our ways and means invested in the walls our nations have built between ourselves and those whom we wish to keep out. Throughout our modern history we have taken each step in the construction of defensive borders with few doubts in mind, from stones to bricks and mortar, to rifles and barbed wire, to missiles and tanks and the firestorm contained in an atom. And now here we are, devoted to the efforts of surveillance, repair, and dread.
    Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide. Probably we began with more theoretical notions of ethnic purity—the wish to keep the apples out of our pines—and for most of the last century we rationalized our walls in terms of ideology, but the Iron Curtain has now dramatically fallen. Now we have fashioned from the crumbling boundaries of the Cold War a whole new shape of division, fundamentally between rich and poor. That chasm keeps growing; a quarter of the world’s poor are now poorer than they were fifteen years ago, having struggled only to lose ground.
    The hard boundary between the haves and the have-nots is still defended with armaments, but now it is also bridged by a dancing, illusory world of material wants. Passing through every wall are electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce, who fund their advertising each year with more than a hundred dollars spent for thisplanet’s every man, woman, child. “This world of inequality is also a world of solitude,” writes Eduardo Galeano, in which multitudes of the desperate are led “to confuse being with having.” And condemned to have not.
    In the name of God and all the fishes, a hundred dollars for every human alive, solely to lure them all into want! To consider this material tyranny is to begin, surely, to understand why protest against the global corporate order throws itself down weeping in the streets from Seattle to Genoa to Pakistan. Imagine how